My Webnovel Experiment

You may… or may not have noticed that I haven’t been updating my space opera webserial The Lore of Hegira on VOCAL lately.

This is because I’ve been experimenting with a few different platforms such as Amazon Kindle Vella, (Royal Road - not published, only considered), and the VOCAL Chapters community. My aim was to see which if my webserial would perform well on any of these platforms.

Short answer: it did not.

Since The Lore of Hegira did not seem to be getting much traction on any of these platforms, I decided to try something new.

I’ve known about webnovel.com for quite some time but was never confident about my ability to update my story as often as that platform demands. Even so, a few days ago, I was finally willing to give publishing a story on webnovel.com a try, just to see what I could accomplish.

The Webnovel Difference

webnovel.com is accessible on the web on PCs but I do get the distinct impression that the platform puts more effort into marketing and developing their Android and Apple apps… which are easy to use. I do have it downloaded to my cellphone, but I’m a luddite who loves my good old laptop, so it’s very hard to get me to switch to reading on my phone. Plus, my little Old Lady eyes can’t really handle that teenie tiny font on my phone.

I honestly don’t know whether it’s the mobile phone app accessibility that makes the difference, but in a mere 24 hours, the first five chapters of the story that I had posted received over 1000 views. This isn’t all that impressive when you consider that those numbers are just views and not the number of people actually taking the time to read all the chapters and bookmarking my story.

It clearly did get more eyeballs on my story, and far many more people now know it exists than when I had it published on Kindle Vella, Vocal, and Substack combined, and that’s greatly encouraging, to say the least.

Challenges

Now, there are several challenges that I personally, have faced using webnovel.com. These are all minor issues like me not understanding how to navigate the Webnovel Authors Discord channels or me being so terrible at Math that I really don’t understand the metrics they so generously share for my story. Or me not understanding how to categorize/tag my story so that people will be able to find it. I don’t understand some of the newfangled terminology… like seriously. What does “System” as a genre/trope/tag really mean??? I’ve figured out “Cultivation” but I feel like I only have a very sketchy understanding of what “System” actually entails… but, I digress.

I think I also inadvertently signed my story up for their “Webnovel Spirity Awards 2023” and I have no idea if I can or how to get out of it.

Like I said, all minor stuff, in the grand scheme of things.

Successes

I have actually managed to update The Lore of Hegira almost every single day since I first starting publishing the story. As of this morning, 11 chapters in total have already been posted, and I’m happy to say the story is progressing nicely—and that I can update daily… or at the very least, almost daily, for the time being.

Readers, Ratings & Reviews Needed

Naturally, what The Lore of Hegira needs to succeed as a webserial, at the end of the day, is people reading and engaging with the story. If you think webserials might be your thing…or if they already are, do give webnovel.com a gander. (use Invite Code: ry9xg8HE)

You just might find some truly entertaing stories stairs. Naturally, I’d love for you to Add The Lore of Hegira to your Library, not to mention Rate and Review it.

Chapter comments, constructive critiques, and questions from readers are always most welcome!